Background

Their members communicate in language that is natural, open, honest, direct, funny and often shocking. Whether explaining or complaining, joking or serious, the human voice is unmistakably genuine. It can't be faked. Most corporations, on the other hand, only know how to talk in the soothing, humorless monotone of the mission statement, marketing brochure, and your-call-is-important-to-us busy signal. Same old tone, same old lies. But learning to speak in a human voice is not some trick, nor will corporations convince us they are human with lip service about "listening to customers.
" While many such people already work for companies today, most companies ignore their ability to deliver genuine knowledge, opting instead to crank out sterile happytalk that insults the intelligence of markets literally too smart to buy it.

We showed how the combined effects of emerging Internet technologies, increased computing power, and fast, pervasive digital communications were spawning new ways to manage talent and assets as well as new thinking about organizational structures. Since then, the technology landscape has continued to evolve rapidly. Facebook, in just over two short years, has quintupled in size to a network that touches more than 500 million users. More than 4 billion people around the world now use cell phones, and for 450 million of those people the Web is a fully mobile experience. The rapidly shifting technology environment raises serious questions for executives about how to help their companies capitalize on the transformation under way.

The Four Primary Types of Social Media Strategy. Image: Water chess board by cozmicberliner The following is draft material for my next book, Welcome to the Fifth Estate (the follow up to Now Is Gone, which is almost out of print).

Comments may be used in the final edition. You can download the first drafted chapter of the new edition — Welcome to the Fifth Estate — for free. If strategy can be defined as the terms and conditions of how to engage with the Fifth Estate (or whether to engage at all) then there are many different and unique ways to do just that.
Royal Pingdom » Internet 2010 in numbers. Posted in Tech blog on January 12th, 2011 by Pingdom What happened with the Internet in 2010?

How many websites were added? How many emails were sent? How many Internet users were there? This post will answer all of those questions and many, many more. We used a wide variety of sources from around the Web to put this post together. Prepare for a good kind of information overload. Email 107 trillion – The number of emails sent on the Internet in 2010.294 billion – Average number of email messages per day.1.88 billion – The number of email users worldwide.480 million – New email users since the year before.89.1% – The share of emails that were spam.262 billion – The number of spam emails per day (assuming 89% are spam).2.9 billion – The number of email accounts worldwide.25% – Share of email accounts that are corporate.

This was written in collaboration with Kio Stark in 20 minutes because we only had 20 minutes to get it done.
Most Important Social Media Events of 2010 [Infographic]
10 Business Models that rocked 2010. GM's Christopher Barger: 'We're headed toward a social media version of the dotcom bubble burst'
Christopher Barger knows first-hand the challenges the automotive industry has faced in recent years.

As General Motors' director of global social media, Barger is in a unique position of determining social programs while also remaining active in the communities that his company has built. As he says, "Let's face it the auto industry, and GM in particular, have given people plenty to be unhappy about in the past few years.
" As the industry and GM have focused on rebuilding, however, social has become a significant part of that.
How PR 2.0 Created the Social Media Bubble. Image by John Petrick The social media influence bubble finds its basis in measurement of inaccurate barometers.

While one can use glittering generalities in defining influence — such as the ability “to cause desirable and measurable actions and outcomes” — in reality, those desirable actions are vapid benchmarks. Specifically, PR 2.0 measurements are participation oriented: retweets, impressions, follower counts, blog rankings, and other public measures of “conversation.” Responsibility for the resulting social media bubble and the increasing demand for impact belongs to the PR industry in its 2.0 incarnation.